From: Ken Deifik Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 19:50:35 -0800 Subject: Chat room
Abe wrote me in a private post:
>A while back you had a project that you were considering.....harp-l chat or
>something. What ever became of that idea?
I was asked by a company that was doing a very good chat room program to assemble a group and be ready to do a room as a test. That's when I contacted Harp-l. I was then told by the company that they were still working out kinks in the product. After a while they just disappeared. I was pretty disappointed about not having a chat room for our posse and for having been made to look a little silly. Hopefully at some point in the future, when high bandwidth is common, we'll be able to have a Polesky-style chat room with real time talk.
What happened to the company? My theory is that they were told early on that a company with really good chat room software was a highly investable company, and by the time they developed their product this was no longer the case. In fact, as far as I know, "chat room software" is a phrase uttered to clear a room of venture capitalists.
Second, their software was Java based. The plus side of this is that one wouldn't need to download or install any special plugins. Nowadays plugins are considered a joke among many web professionals, because most people won't download them, making any content you wish to provide that needs them useless. Further, most plugins are a workaround in an era of low bandwidth, which is coming to an end. Who will need Real Audio when you can hear CD quality sound in real time over the net simply by accessing a wav file on someone else's system? Why invest in such technologies? High bandwidth is as much an article of faith as talking pictures were in the era of silent film.
Aside from Real Audio and to a much lesser extent Shockwave, and maybe Beatnik, I don't see any plugins really having any impact. So a java-based chatroom that just runs off of code that is embedded in a web page sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, almost all Java programs that I've run have run poorly, and many have crashed my system, including some written by very, very good programmers. There are clearly problems with Java that nobody with an investment in the language wishes to discuss.
I believe that 1998 is the year when many of us will get high internet bandwidth, and home video conferencing is going to really take off before the century turns. At which point the earth will shrink to the size of a golfball.
